Effects Of Ethephon On Rat Physilogical And Behavior Development And Corresponding Mechanisms

[Objectives]: As a kind of plant regulators, ethephon plays more and more important role in agriculture yield. It is used to improve plant production and mature the fruits picked off. Some specialists have doubted that the use of ethephon had correlation with children precocity. But this is only a guess, there haven't been epidemiological or animal study on this aspect at home and abroad by now. So we design the assay to study whether ethephon can effect physiological and behavior development of rat in adolescency, and to discuss the corresponding mechanisms. Thereby, it will provide initial experiment base for further study about ethephon's effects on children' s development and ethephon's environmental risk degree value.[Methods]: In the study, we selected Wistar rats as our study object, and carried short-time (rats were dosed for 20 days by gavage with ethephon) and one-generation (rats were exposed to ethephon by drinking water, and their offspring were maintained the same water until puberty) experiment respectively. Effects on adolescence rats' body weight, viscera/body weight ratio, vaginal opening(VO) and estrous cycle were probed with different doses of ethephon. Changes of offspring's physiological and behavior development were observed. The activity of uterus peroxidase was determined. By using radioimmunoassay(RJA), rats serum hormones concentrations were detected, such as estradiol(E₂), testosterone (T), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH) , and so on. Then the liver toxicity of ethephon was inspected.[Results]: 1. Ethephon's effects on rats' physiological and biochemical indexesExposure to ethephon for 20 days didn't change rats' weight, yet exposure from mater, obviously lightened female offspring's weight of the highest-dose group and male offspring's weight of all three dose groups(P<0.05).